Call for Papers: Rethinking Anglo-German Relations
We invite graduate and early-career scholars from across the Humanities to join us at Lincoln College, Oxford on 17th June 2019 for a one-day graduate conference onAnglo-German relations, 1918 to the present day.
This conference explores 100 years of cultural relations between Britain and Germany from perspectives as diverse as trade, technology, music, art, literature, language, sport, and travel. Such approaches have long been used for studying the latter half of the ‘long nineteenth century’. Indeed, since the publication of Paul Kennedy’s The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism in 1980, a whole outpouring of studies tracing the cultural interconnectedness of the two nations has complicated our understanding not only of the tensions leading to the outbreak of the First World War, but, more generally, also how a more nuanced understanding of the Anglo-German relationship might best be explored. Historians, musicologists, linguists, philosophers, and scholars of literature have all contributed towards a picture of ‘cultural exchanges’ that are often otherwise hidden by grand narratives of diplomatic relations. An equal degree of detail in relations has not, however, been applied to the remainder of the twentieth century and beyond. Here, the relationship is still largely explored from the perspective of high politics with classic treatments of Appeasement, the Second World War, Allied occupation, and the European Economic Community/European Union taking centre stage. This conference seeks to address this imbalance by inviting academics from a range of disciplines to discuss their recent work on, and varying approaches to, relations from 1918 to the present.
Some of the overarching questions will include:
- How best can we consider the existence of Anglo-German cultural ties alongsidethe big events of modern European history?
- How can studies of cultural relations within our own fields problematise wider understandings of political/diplomatic histories and vice versa? What can we learn from the approaches and methodologies of colleagues working in other disciplines?
- What continuities and/or discontinuities in Anglo-German history emerge in a multidisciplinary discussion?
- How can we think about Anglo-German relations in a wider European or even global context?